The Wabash Factor

by Howard Fast

  “No, you’re all right.”

  “Harry, the kids! The kids are easy! They’ll kill our kids!”

  “No, not so easy. Right now our kids are on a plane on their way to Ireland—” And then I told her what I had done. She didn’t react at first. She stood very still, a handsome, strong woman, her carrot-colored hair, tied in a bun at the back of her neck, streaked with gray, reminding me, always reminding me, of all our good past years together, of the way I teased her about the great mop of flaming hair which I considered the most beautiful thing in the world. She stood very still and tense, facing me, her hands gripping my arms so tightly it hurt, her big purse, always stuffed with books and notes, slung over her shoulder, and finally she said quietly, “You did the right thing, Harry. It will scare the very devil out of them, but they’re good kids and they will follow your orders. They’ll be safe with Sean; I guess safer than anywhere else, and Sean would give his life for us and the kids. Did you use a clean phone?”

  “I called from Oscar’s apartment.”

  “I guess that’s safe. But what do we do, Harry? How long? I’m so frightened. Our lives, our family—it’s all disintegrating.”

  “An hour at a time, a day at a time.”

  We walked back to the car. I told her what Courtny had said.

  “Maybe he’s right, Harry.”

  I lay down on the ground and squeezed under the car. The bug was inside the front right fender. “It’s only a beeper,” I told her. “It spots us.”

  “Then they know where we are?”

  “Roughly. They would have to hone in on the signal to find us.”

  “Or they might be watching us right now from over there.”

  About a dozen cars were parked around the circle. They were all unoccupied, nor was there anyone else standing by a car.

  “Maybe. The cars look empty. It doesn’t really matter.”

  I threw the bug away, and we got into the car and drove out of the park. It was somewhat odd, my throwing the bug away, like cutting some kind of umbilical cord. The bug was evidence. If you’re a cop, you don’t throw away evidence, even if you don’t know where the evidence points or what it proves. We drove home—which had become a euphemism for a battleground. I intended only to touch base.

  We went in together, my gun half drawn, but the apartment was empty. I motioned for Fran not to speak, and then I went over the place and found four bugs. By God, they were thorough. Putting my lips to Fran’s ear, I whispered, “Small suitcase, three or four days.” I left her to do the packing, while I filled a large briefcase with our checkbooks, our telephone-number books, address books, and anything I could find that might indicate that Fran’s brother was the headmaster of what was called in Ireland, as in England, a “public school.” I also took the guns. Almost every cop keeps an extra gun, sometimes with him, mostly at home. I kept two extra guns in the apartment, as much as both Fran and I disliked them, both of them .22-caliber automatics. The larger one was a twelve-shot automatic, backed up to fire special longs. The bullet was small, the force large, and the shells were a type of .22-caliber longs no longer manufactured. The gun was experimental, produced briefly during World War Two, and after a few hundred had been made, both gun and cartridge had been discontinued. I bought the gun one summer in New Hope, Pennsylvania, with a single box of eighty cartridges. When they were used up, the gun could be thrown away or kept as a curiosity. The one I bought had never been previously fired. I tried it with about ten rounds and scored high. It fired very true. The other gun was a very small purse automatic pistol, Italian-made and holding eight .22 shorts. I bought it for Fran, but I never had the courage to give it to her and ask her to carry it. I had the feeling that if I had, she would have turned on me angrily and demanded to know why I thought she would touch one of the filthy things. She didn’t turn on me now as I handed it to her. She simply made a face and tucked it away in her purse. I put my gun in my jacket pocket with half a dozen extra shells. As I have said, in all my years of police work, I never fired my gun off the range until that night on the highway, and I figured that half a dozen extra cartridges were enough for anything that might come up. Which did not mean that I was a bad shot. As a matter of fact, I was a damn good marksman.

  Putting her lips against my ear, Fran whispered, “Will we ever come back here, Harry? I love this place.” Her eyes were brimming with tears.

  “God damn it, of course!” I said aloud.

  Fred Jones, the superintendent of our building, was putting out the garbage cans when we came down with our bags. He was a quiet black man who did his work and minded his own business, and he had been with the building since we moved in. Now he came over and asked whether he could help me.

  “Get in the car, please,” I told Fran. I gave her the keys. “Lock the doors and stay there and wait for me.”

  “Where are you going?”

  “Just inside for a moment.”

  After she sat down in the car, I said to Jones, “You son of a bitch, after all these years, after all I’ve done for your kids and relatives when they got busted. God damn it, your son’s in college at Hunter. If I hadn’t gone to bat for him, he’d be sitting in jail.”

  Fred’s face tightened with pain. “I was scared, scared. Jesus, you know what it is to be black, Lieutenant. They said they were cops, feds, and that if I didn’t cooperate, I go to jail.”

  “Where are they now?”

  “After they went to your apartment, they set up in the supply room.”

  “With a tap.”

  He nodded, his eyes wet. “I got shit in my blood,” he muttered.

  I went into the basement, walked to the supply room, and flung open the door. They had all their equipment in there, hooked up properly, as well as beer and sandwiches and a big wedge of chocolate cake. “All right,” I yelled, drawing my gun, “get up! Spread out against the wall! Face the wall—both hands against it.” There were plumbing supplies and bags of plaster at the base of the wall, and as they faced the wall and leaned toward it, I kicked back their feet, immobilizing them. One was a large fat man whose pendulous stomach braced him against a toilet throne. The other was small and plump and wearing gold-rimmed spectacles. “This,” I said, “is a bust. I am Lieutenant Golding, whose telephone you are tapping. You both fill me with disgust, and if either of you makes any kind of a problem, I won’t kill you but I’ll take pleasure in shooting out your kneecaps. And I’m good enough to do it, believe me.”

  “We believe you. Jesus Christ, Lieutenant, we’re technicians. We get paid and we do a job. That’s all. So don’t lay it on us.”

  “Yeah, I know. You’re technicians. Now listen, because I want this formal and clean. I arrest you under the Eavesdropping section of the New York State Criminal Code. Just for your edification, this is a Class E felony, which can be punishable with four years of imprisonment. I am now going to read you your rights. You have the right to remain silent—” and so forth and so on, and when I had finished, Fran’s voice came from behind me, “So that’s what it sounds like. I always wondered how you used the Miranda.”

  I glanced behind me. She was standing there, the little pistol in her hand.

  “What are you doing here?”

  “I don’t intend to be a widow. We started this together, we’ll finish it together.”

  I didn’t argue with her. I cuffed the two technicians and had them empty their pockets. They had nothing but a few keys and about sixty dollars and change, no identification of any kind. Fran found an old envelope and we put the stuff into it.

  “And now. What do we do now?”

  “We take them over to the station house and book them.”

  At the station house, the desk sergeant was O’Kidder, and he looked at me strangely when I told him to book the suspects for Eavesdropping. We don’t book too many people for Eavesdropping, and O’Kidder was puzzled. He wanted to know whether it was a city law. Some other cops paused to join in the discussion.

  “For C
hrist’s sake, book them!” I snapped. That was unusual. I rarely raised my voice around the uniforms. “It’s the state criminal code, Class E felony.”

  I went upstairs to find Courtny, but he wasn’t there, and Toomey said to me, “What is it, Lieutenant? You look terrible.”

  “I feel terrible.”

  “Are you sick?”

  “Not that kind of terrible. Where’s the captain?”

  “He went downtown for a meeting with Crown and Roberts.” Edward Crown was chief of detectives; Max Roberts was the zone commander; and both of them were very large stuff in the New York City Police Department. “I’m worried,” Toomey went on. “There’s something coming down that’s not like anything we ever had going on before. Do you know what I mean, Lieutenant?”

  “No.”

  “All right.” He shrugged. “You don’t want to talk about it. I can understand that.”

  “What in hell don’t I want to talk about, Toomey?”

  “I don’t know—”

  “What’s happening, Toomey? We been together a long time. If you know something I ought to know, tell me.”

  He hesitated a long moment before he said, “The thing downtown concerns you.”

  “How?”

  “I swear to God I don’t know. It’s just that the word’s around. You know how the word gets around.”

  “Yeah, I know how the word gets around. Look, Toomey, I’m not going to explain, but I booked two suspects downstairs. I arrested them myself. I found them operating an elaborate tap on my phone, the kind of thing you put up when you’re doing an operation against the mob. I want you to send a couple of guys to my place, the basement, and have them pick up the equipment for evidence, but do it quick. I wanted to talk to Courtny about it, but you can fill him in. I have to go now, but I’ll call in and talk to you later.”

  Downstairs, Fran was sitting primly on the bench, watching the procession of muggers, dopers, hookers, thieves, victims, robbed men, wailing women, battered women, lost children, and other odds and ends of any normal day at the precinct. I guess it was a good many years since she had been to the station house, and she told me that just to sit there and watch was so fascinating that she almost forgot, at least for a moment, the lunacy that had infected our lives. I told her about the conversation with Toomey, and she wanted to know whether I could guess what it was all about. I told her that my guess was no better than hers. We left the car at the station house, double-parked as always—most station houses were built before the prowl car became an institution, at a time long ago when cops walked a beat—and we wandered slowly downtown along Park Avenue. I chose Park Avenue because it was the least populated with pedestrians of all the East Side avenues, and thereby the best place to spot a tail. There was no tail. I’m sure that Fran was thinking what I was thinking, that by now our children were almost certainly airborne and on their way to Ireland. There was no use talking about it. When enough hours had passed, we would call Sean at the school in Dublin. Until then we could only wait and pray.

  Once we knew we were clean of any tail, we took a cab down to the Primrose Hotel, a small, decently priced family hotel on 36th Street between Park Avenue and Lexington. The manager of the hotel, Bill Hoffman, had trouble at one time and I helped him out of it. That’s one small advantage of being a cop; like a physician, you can do favors that cannot really ever be repaid. Hoffman’s sixteen-year-old daughter had fallen in with a pimp, done a couple of tricks for him, and had been picked up. I got her out with no booking, put the fear of God into the pimp, and then arranged, with the help of Fran and her brother, Sean, for Hoffman to ship the kid off to Ireland, where she spent the next three years at a convent school. Hoffman and his wife felt that I had saved the kid’s life, so when we checked into the Primrose that day and I asked him to back us up with the register names of Alvin and Clooney Ridge, he was only too happy to do so. I have always felt that anyone who can’t trust people is lost, and I explained to Bill Hoffman that this was a matter of life and death, that our lives were in his hands, and that he would simply have to trust me without any further explanations.

  “You got it,” he said. “One hundred percent.” He was a big, fleshy man, a former wrestler. I weigh one hundred and forty-eight pounds stripped. I always felt good having large men on my side.

  We had a bedroom and a little sitting room for thirty dollars a day, half of what it would have cost a stranger and one quarter of what it would have cost in any uptown-class hotel in New York City. I told Hoffman that at ten o’clock or so that evening, we would like to put through a call to Ireland, and that I would happily pay him in cash, if he could keep it out of his records.

  “No sweat,” Hoffman said. “We still got the old switchboard, and tonight Jenny Dwyer is on it. She’s been with us for years—you see, Lieutenant, half our rooms are permanent, old ladies and gentlemen, and they have private lines, and we’re a small hotel to begin with. I’ll send Jenny to have coffee with my wife, and I’ll put the call through myself—no record until we get our bill at the end of the month, and that’s almost two weeks away.”

  Up in our suite, Fran flopped down on the bed, emotionally exhausted. “I won’t be human,” she said, “or make any sense to either of us until we put that call through to Sean.”

  “I know how you feel.”

  “It will be three o’clock in the morning in Ireland. Or is it four? I never could figure it out. But they’ll be there by then. They will, won’t they, Harry? They’ll be there?”

  “Take it easy. Things can go wrong, but the kids would still be safe. Sean could be out of town. He could be spending a few days in London. They might not have booked on the first plane out of Boston.”

  “In March? The planes would be half empty.”

  “Not right after St. Patrick’s Day. Delegations come here for the parade and the festivities, and you know that whenever any of that enormous family your brother married into decide to come to America, they pick St. Patrick’s Day. I’m not saying they didn’t find seats on the first plane out. I just don’t want you to go to pieces if we don’t reach Sean first shot or if the kids are not at the school.”

  “Don’t talk like that, please, Harry.”

  “All right. We switch subjects. You came into that storeroom in the basement like a grim, redheaded Amazon, determined to save her man—”

  “Harry, you’re terrible when you decide to be literary.”

  “Not literary. Colorful. But suppose I was in real trouble, at the point of being killed? What would you do?”

  “Shoot the bastard. How about that, Harry?”

  “It wouldn’t work.”

  “Why not?”

  “Take out the gun.” She took it out of her purse. “Now shoot something.”

  “What!”

  “Shoot something. Anything. Shoot the lights out on that hideous chandelier.”

  “Harry, are you crazy?”

  “Shoot if you must this old gray head. Anything. Trust me.”

  “All right. You explain to Mr. Hoffman.” She pointed the gun at the chandelier. “It won’t. I can’t move the trigger.”

  I took the gun from her and showed her how the safety catch worked. “No gun fires unless you take it off safety. Anyway, do you really think you could shoot at a person?”

  “No.”

  “I don’t think so either. Do you still want the gun?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why?”

  Humor and horror are not so far apart. “Oh, God,” Fran moaned. “Why is anyone in this crazy business? Why are they after us? Why did they try to kill us? Why did they bug our car and our apartment? Why did they tap our telephone? You ask me why I want a gun? Oh, Harry, it’s all coming apart.”

  I lay down on the bed next to her and put my arms around her, and held her to me and kissed her, and she said, “Harry, not sex. I couldn’t even think of it now.”

  “I’m not going that way,” I assured her. “I just want to loosen things up. Now
listen to me, and I’ll spell it out. There’s one bit of sense in this whole thing—Santa Marina. Judge Fitzpatrick is linked to Santa Marina twice. First, his decision on the bench. Second, the same gun that killed Sanchez né Bell. Sanchez-Bell is linked to the drugstore and to the prescription that killed Curtis, whatever was on the prescription. Jimmy Oshun—poor kid, he would have made one hell of a doctor—well, he was linked to the prescription and to Mrs. Curtis. And that phony Dr. Green in Los Angeles, well, he connects with Asher Alan.”

  “And how does Alan connect with anything?”

  “I don’t know, but—”

  “And how do we connect?”

  “I started to make waves, the way Jimmy Oshun did. We don’t know how long this has been going on and we don’t know what’s at the core of it. But I have an idea, Franny. You can’t go back to Columbia tomorrow. Call and give them some excuse. Then, while I’m working, you get over to the public library, the annex at Fifth and 40th Street. They have The New York Times on tape or film, and you can put it on the screen a page at a time. You’ve worked those machines, haven’t you?”

  “I have. What am I looking for?”

  “Death—accidental death of influential people. Not important people, not celebrities, not stars, but people of influence, movers, politicians, lawyers, judges, writers, important college professors—people who die of unexplained heart attacks, hit-and-run, falling out of windows, slipping on the ice, electrocuted in the bathtub, allergic response, falling in front of a train, killed in a car crash, mugged and killed, robbed and killed. Go back five years if you have the time. Anything you’re after will be front page, so you can flip through, day after day almost with a glance.”

  “Right. I understand. But what am I looking for? Or do I just take all of them.”

  “No. Only those who connect in some way with Santa Marina.”

  “Harry, that’s a thin thread. Take Asher Alan. How on earth can you connect him with Santa Marina? How can you connect Israel with Santa Marina?”

  Without thinking or probing, the way you say something off the top of your head, I said, “Santa Marina was one of the first five countries to recognize the State of Israel.”